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This chapter focuses on the legal safeguards against arbitrary arrest and detention: the right to immediate and continuing assistance; the right to communicate with family members; restriction of the length of interrogation sessions and provision of adequate periods for rest and refreshment; medical examination before and after interrogation; detailed recording of all relevant facts concerning interrogation; a requirement that arrested persons be brought before a judge within 24 hours and thereafter kept in custody only under order and supervision of the court; and adequate remedies for bringing complaints of illegal detention or ill-treatment before the court without any delay. It also discusses the development of the Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment adopted by the UN General Assembly.

This concluding chapter reiterates that the circumstances in which the war broke out at Tiamou in April 1917 provided an opportunity to examine the place of fear, rumor, and violence in attempts to maintain colonial power relations. War was not the result of an innocent misunderstanding or mutual incomprehension. Nor was it a product of wild settler imaginations, unprovoked Kanak aggression, or a “savage” reflex. Threats by colonial administrators and their intermediaries during recruitment for the war in Europe were one immediate catalyst. For those on the receiving end, threats were heightened by the specter of arbitrary arrest and grievances accumulated over six decades of French colonization as well as personal and collective enmities, rivalries, and insults.

This chapter focuses on one feature of the Third Reich: the terror system. More specifically, it examines political detention and the origin of concentration camps in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1935–1936, arguing that, despite the improvisation and arbitrariness that characterised the early history of the terror apparatus, there were numerous continuities with the regimes of punishment and discipline developed in earlier periods of German history. The chapter explains how the powers of arbitrary arrest conferred upon the Gestapo drew upon long-standing traditions of police detention during states of emergency. It also contends that local officials and Nazi leaders invoked the traditional associations of ‘work’, ‘discipline’, and ‘order’ to legitimate the new penal regime, resulting in the successful naturalisation of the concentration camp system within the framework of the wider penal system and dramatically expanding and altering the boundaries of the terror apparatus.